"But it's not who you are underneath, it's what you do that defines you" -- Rachel Dawes in Batman Begins
This catchy quote from Batman Begins had me a bit puzzled when I first saw the movie. What does she mean by that, I thought? But it stuck. If you have seen the movie, you will understand why.
And then in a totally different context, while trying to submit zAgile to various search engines and business directories, it became somewhat clearer. The problem I encountered had to do with figuring out where to categorize zAgile. Yahoo's taxonomy seemed pretty dated and perhaps severely constraining. It shouldn't be so difficult, I thought. But it was. Why do I have to fit zAgile into some pre-defined category? Why can't I just say 'what it does' and have 'what it is' inferred? The problem with Categories is that an individual may belong to more than one category and the categorizations are not necessarily permanent. Categories definitely cannot be used to define what something 'is'.
So it seems that we are constantly constraining ourselves by putting 'things' into specific categories. When you have to put a book on a shelf in a library then obviously you need to make some hard choices. But in life, what something 'is' ought to be defined (and inferred) based on its attributes and relations to other things.
In a somewhat obtuse, indirect and 'Heideggerian' sort-of way, maybe Rachel was trying to say the same thing. Her quote curiously made me realize the key difference between taxonomy and ontology. We are so used to dealing with taxonomies when developing applications that the power and flexibility of ontologies are difficult to grasp and leverage. While ontologies often take the form of taxonomic class hierarchies, they are not constrained by them. Therefore, rather than struggle with categorizing something, we use an ontology to define it using its characteristics (or attributes) and relationships to other things. And all that it 'IS' is simply inferred.
And that is all what Rachel was trying to tell Bruce Wayne (so I believe, anyway).
-Sanjiva
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